The editors and crew at SBM have an announcement that needs to be made. This morning, Dr. Amy Tuteur tendered her resignation and will therefore no longer be a blogger at SBM. Some of you might already be aware of this development because Dr. Tuteur has already announced her decision on her own blog. That is why we considered it important to post an announcement here on SBM as soon as possible.

While we are sorry to see Dr. Tuteur go and wish her well in whatever future endeavors she decides to pursue, over the last several weeks it had become clear to both the editors of SBM and Dr. Tuteur herself that, although Dr. Tuteur had routinely been able to stimulate an unprecedented level of discussion regarding the issues we at SBM consider important, SBM has not been a good fit for her and she has not been a good fit for SBM. Over the last few days mutual efforts between the editors and Dr. Tuteur to resolve our differences came to an impasse. Unfortunately for all parties, that impasse appeared to be unresolvable and resulted in Dr. Tuteur’s decision to leave SBM.

As a result of Dr. Tuteur’s departure, we will be adjusting the posting schedule in order to cover her normal Thursday slot. Final decisions have not been made yet, but we expect that every weekday will continue to be covered, with at least one post per weekday.

The House of Commons Science and Technology Committee (STC) has released a report, Evidence Check 2: Homeopathy, in which they recommend that the NHS stop funding homeopathy. The report is a rare commodity – a thoroughly science-based political document.

The committee went beyond simply stating that homeopathy does not work, and revealed impressive insight into the ethical, practical, and scientific problems caused by NHS support for an implausible and ineffective pseudoscience.

The STC formed in October of 2009, and this is their second report. The goals of the STC itself are significant step forward:

The purpose of Evidence Check is to examine how the Government uses evidence to formulate and review its policies.

When I first heard that a retrovirus had been identified as a possible cause of chronic fatigue syndrome, I withheld judgment and awaited further developments. When I heard that two subsequent studies had failed to replicate the findings of the first, I assumed that the first had been a false alarm and would be disregarded. Not so.

It’s a classic case of wishful thinking outweighing good judgment. One unconfirmed report of an association between the XMRV virus and chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) resulted in a rush to test for the virus, speculation about possible implications, and even suggestions for treatment. And the subsequent negative studies did little or nothing to reverse the trend.

At least, I never saw it coming this fast and this dramatically. After all, this is a saga that has been going on for twelve solid years now, and it’s an investigation that has been going on at least since 2004. Yes, I’m referring to that (possibly former) hero of the anti-vaccine movement, the man who is arguably the most responsible for suffering and death due to the resurgence of measles in the U.K. because of his role in frightening parents about the MMR vaccine.

As Steve Novella and my good buddy pointed out a few days ago (and as Steve pointed out in an interview on NPR), Dr. Steven Laureys admitted that Rom Houben, the unfortunate victim of a car crash that left him in what had been diagnosed as a persistent vegetative state, was in fact not able to communicate through the woo known as facilitated communication. This came as no surprise to anyone who has followed FC over the years. In fact, what had come as a surprise is that Dr. Laureys could have been so easily taken in by pseudoscience that had been so thoroughly debunked in the 1990s. To his credit, though, after a period of initially stubbornly defending FC, he relented and allowed objective testing, and the result was predictable. It took a few days, but the English language world is learning of the failure of FC in Houben’s case:

The sceptics said it was impossible – and it was. The story of Rom Houben of Belgium, which made headlines worldwide last November when he was shown to be “talking”, was today revealed to have been nothing of the sort.

Dr Steven Laureys, one of the doctors treating him, acknowledged that his patient could not make himself understood after all. Facilitated communication, the technique said to have made Houben’s apparent contact with the outside world possible, did not work, Laureys declared.

“We did not have all the facts before,” he said. “To me, it’s enough to say that this method doesn’t work.” Just three months ago the doctor was proclaiming that Houben had been trapped in his own body, the victim of a horrendous misdiagnosis, and only rescued from his terrible plight thanks to medical advances.

What was not reported is that skeptics were involved in the testing of Rom Houben. I recently received a statement from the Belgian Skeptics (SKEPP):(more…)

This week on Science-Based Medicine I wrote an article about a new study looking at the onset of autism symptoms, showing that most children who will later be diagnosed with autism will show clear signs of autism at 12 months of age, but not 6 months. This is an interesting study that sheds light on the natural course of autism. I also discussed the implications of this study for the claim that autism is caused by vaccines.

Unfortunately, I made a statement that is simply wrong. I wrote:

Many children are diagnosed between the age of 2 and 3, during the height of the childhood vaccine schedule.

First, this was a vague statement – not quantitative, and was sloppily written, giving a different impression from the one I intended. I make these kinds of errors from time to time – that is one of the perils of daily blogging about technical topics, and posting blogs without editorial or peer-review. Most blog readers understand this, and typically I will simply clarify my prose or correct mistakes when they are pointed out.

However, since I often write about topics that interest dedicated ideologues who seek to sow anti-science and confusion, sometimes these errors open the door for the flame warriors. That is what happened in this case.

There once was a time when all food was organic and no pesticides were used. Health problems were treated with folk wisdom and natural remedies. There was no obesity, and people got lots of exercise. And in that time gone by, the average life expectancy was … 35!

That’s right. For most of human existence, according to fossil and anthropological data, the average human life expectancy was 35 years. As recently as 1900, American average life expectancy was only 48. Today, advocates of alternative health bemoan the current state of American health, the increasing numbers of obese people, the lack of exercise, the use of medications, the medicalization of childbirth. Yet life expectancy has never been longer, currently 77.7 years in the US.

Advocates of alternative health have a romanticized and completely unrealistic notion of purported benefits of a “natural” lifestyle. Far from being a paradise, it was hell. The difference between an average lifespan of 48 and one of 77.7 can be accounted for by modern medicine and increased agricultural production brought about by industrial farming methods (including pesticides). Nothing fundamental has changed about human beings. They are still prey to the same illnesses and accidents, but now they can be effectively treated. Indeed, some diseases can be completely prevented by vaccination.

So why are advocates of alternative health complaining? They are complaining because they long for an imagined past that literally never existed. In that sense, alternative health represents a form of fundamentalism. Obviously, fundamentalism is about religion and the analogy can only go so far, but there are several important characteristics of religious fundamentalism that are shared by alternative health advocacy. These include:(more…)

Understanding the natural history of a disease is an important framework to have. It not only is critical for prognosis, but also informs us about diagnostic and screening strategies, is important to assessing interventions, and provides clues to causation.

There has been much debate about the early course of autism, specifically the earliest age at which autism may be detected. At present scientific evidence suggests that autism is dominantly genetic, and so researchers expect that there may be early signs of autism even in infancy. Traditionally, however, autism is not diagnosed until age 2-3, when parents bring their children to medical attention, or when signs are detected on routine well-child visits or in day-care.

Retrospective studies, largely involving review of home movies, have suggested that autism can be diagnosed as early as 6-12 months, suggesting that parental report is not an adequate screen because subtle signs are hard to detect without rigorous observation.

Statistics show that the life-time risk for an adult American to develop colorectal cancer (CRC) is approximately 6%. Colorectal cancer is the second leading cause of cancer deaths in the United States. In the US there are currently 146,970 new cases and 50,630 deaths each year. Between 1973 and 1995, mortality from CRC declined by 20.5%, and incidence declined by 7.4% in the United States.

The US Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) recommends screening for colorectal cancer (CRC) using fecal occult blood testing, sigmoidoscopy, or colonoscopy, in adults, beginning at age 50 years and continuing until age 75 years.(more…)

A MISCARRIAGE OF JUSTICE THAT HAD A (SORT OF) HAPPY ENDING

Back in September and then again last week, I wrote briefly (for me) about an incident that I considered to be a true miscarriage of justice, namely the prosecution of two nurses for having reported the dubious and substandard medical practices of a physician on the staff of Winkler County Hospital in Kermit, Texas. The physician’s name is Dr. Rolando Arafiles, and he happened to be a friend of the Winkler County Sheriff, Robert Roberts, who also happened to have been a patient of Dr. Arafiles and very grateful to him for having saved his life. The nurses, Anne Mitchell and Vickilyn Galle, were longtime employees of Winkler County Hospital, a fifteen bed hospital in rural West Texas. Although some of you may have seen extensive blogging about this before, I thought it very important to discuss some of the issues involved on this blog. Moreover, there is an aspect to this case that the mainstream media reporting on it has missed almost completely, as you will see. Finally, this case showed me something very ugly about my profession, not just because a doctor tried to destroy the lives of two good nurses through his connections to the good ol’ boy network in Winkler County

Let’s recap what happened, a story that reached its climax last Thursday. In 2008, Dr. Arafiles joined the staff of Winkler County Hospital (WCH). It did not take too long for it to become apparent that there were serious problems with this particular doctor. Mitchell and Galle, who worked in quality assurance were dismayed to learn that Dr. Arafiles would abuse his position to try to sell various herbal remedies to patients in the WCH emergency room and the county health clinic and to take supplies from the hospital to perform procedures at a patient’s home rather than in the hospital. No, it wasn’t the fact that Dr. Arafiles recommended supplements and various other “alt-med” remedies, it’s that he recommended supplements and various other “alt-med” remedies that he sold from his own business–a definite no-no both ethically and, in many states, legally. Mitchell reported her concerns to the administration of WCH, which did pretty much absolutely nothing. Consequently, on April 7, 2009, Mitchell and Galle anonymously reported their concerns to the Texas Medical Board (TMB). In June, WCH fired the two nurses without explanation.(more…)